Gratitude and Grief (again): Thanksgiving 2025 edition

Gratitude and grief were key words for us over the past few years, starting with my near-death accident and moving through dwindling team and stolen resources and personal betrayals. And we’ve certainly come back to them in 2025 which began with a lightening bolt of stage IV cancer and complete upheaval of home and work and life and future. The pairing insists that the world is complex, that even in times of shaking loss, if we pay attention, we will see reasons to be thankful. The fingerprints of divine mercy grace even the scorched waste of a rough year. As we have grieved, we have gratefully celebrated too.

   

November winds down into the American national holiday of Thanksgiving, and the paradoxical pairing pins the complexity of gratitude and grief in place once again. Gratitude is the essence of this holiday: for survival, for feasting with friends and family, for finding our place in a story that hints at redemption in spite of darkening days. For the unfathomable list of things tangible and intangible provided from outside in. We humanly need the communal pause to focus on that providence. Being thankful is not a time for gloating. Being thankful acknowledges the many ways our days are better than they could be. Thanks becomes both humbling and directional, a posture that notices the thousandfold bounty of access to much we did nothing to earn or deserve. In 2025 we don’t have to invent penicillin or electricity; vaccines and public resources have smoothed all our paths. Many of us thank parents, or elders, or teachers, or colleagues, as well as thanking God. It is a national moment to breathe in the changing season, to taste the pleasure of food and drink, to lean into the relational girding of our neighborhoods. To look beyond ourselves.

But even the week of Thanksgiving, gratitude is not a platitude that coats a glossy veneer over troubles. We gather around tables spread in metaphorical wildernesses. Attending to reality requires the dual discipline of noticing reasons to be thankful, and reasons to mourn. Both have a direction towards family, community, and God. Psalms of lament and psalms of thanksgiving, both/and, give voice to the tangible truths.

So this Thanksgiving, join us in thanking God that Scott’s cancer treatment is actively extending his life. (And thanks for all the comments on his birthday post below!) I am writing this on the house-on-the-rock porch in Sago, WV, where a rain-swollen river churns by and acres of woods embody the beauty of death renewing life, leaf color fading as leaf-fall returns richness to the soil, thankful for the wild wonder of this old farm. Two of our kids will travel to California to bolster one grandmother’s holiday, two will join their loved ones’ families, and we will be hosted by my sister and nephews and mother, thankful for all these family networks. Every day we miss our Africa life, but we also have ongoing reasons to be thankful. New doctors trained in multiple residencies and medical schools multiplying healing. A failed rebellion in our old home manipulated young people and cost some their lives this past month, but that accentuates the goodness of hundreds of others a few miles away daily grounded in Gospel truth and nourishing safety at CSB, as the school year draws to a peaceful close. Our photographer in Fort Portal has gathered a cadre of others to create art and tell stories that the world needs to hear, and just joined a sister team to bless a country in our Area with much suffering and few believers. Thousands of blind people have had sight restored as the Eye Love Africa project trains and provides cataract surgery. Two places that have suffered horrific violence, this year and for decades, had Gospel-hope incarnation visits from our teams, and a third has our team back making homes in spite of temporary evacuations. Hundreds and hundreds of people heard Bible stories that they could relate to and ponder the nature of God’s love and work in their immediate worlds. On every team, we are the bridge generation to African saints with bigger hearts and minds. SO MUCH to be thankful for, SO MUCH that God continues to do through the 80 workers we left behind, so grateful to maintain a thread of connection to all this work. 

And this Thanksgiving, join us in holding onto the paradox of both gratitude and grief. The God whose mercy allowed all the above is not offended by our crying out as we encounter the massive sorrows that persist. Wars have not ceased, and from Sudan to Congo to Gaza to Ukraine we lament the greed and fear that preclude peace. Hunger has not ceased, and in every part of our Area we ask God to provide more funding and food for those who suffer. Sickness has not ceased, so we call out for God to spare the lives of people we know and love, and the many more that are known to God and not to us, to protect women in labor and vulnerable newborns and frail elderly and everyone on the margins. 2025 has been a shocking year to be back in America where we are more tuned into the news, to pay attention to the abundance of injustices here and everywhere, of punishment without due process, of sexual harm to children, of mass shootings, of resource concentration to serve the wealthiest at the expense of the poorest, of rescinding protection and hospitality to the stranger . . . we lament all this, and the unseen truth that our hearts need new priorites in Jesus.

At your Thanksgiving table this week, we send our wishes that you embrace the discipline of searching carefully for traces of God’s goodness to stir your thankfulness, and that you unabashedly mingle those thanks with weeping over the world’s woes.

Jesus wept for Jerusalem on the way to his final passover feast with his closest friends. May we all make room in our hearts for complex realities.

Thankful for a tractor and trees, getting ready for winter

Thankful for this farm and the family that settled in Sago

And pray for us to be thankful for countless zoom calls (this is how we appear in our little office, calling Africa)

PS if you read this far . . . here is an ablum of songs about the Table that is appropriate to this week, listen as you cook and serve, or if that doesn't work, search Spotify for Table Songs by Porter's Gate.